Alumni

I have an MA degree in Psychology and did my PhD studies in the field of Clinical and Experimental Neuroscience. Currently I'm working in the Memory and Language Research Lab in Budapest. My main interests are focused on cognitive neuroscience and the neuropsychology of several aspects of skill learning (e.g., sequence vs. statistical, perceptual vs. motor, implicit vs. explicit learnint). We explore this type of learning from memory formation to consolidation and how this process is affected by age, sleep, and disorders such as autism, dyslexia, and Spinocerebellar Ataxia. I believe that these studies could lead us not only to a deeper understanding of this learning mechanism but also to discover how we rewire skills and boost habit change.

I'm a FRENCH BIOLOGIST doing a PhD in NEUROSCIENCES at Marcela Peña’s laboratory in Santiago de Chile. I’m studying the cognitive mechanisms that are involved when visual factors affect reading and reading comprehension, using behavior, EEG and eye tracker measures. I run my experiments both at school and at the university, working with High school students. I'm an EDUCATOR too, that's why I chose to do investigation in the gap between schools and laboratories! I’m interested in all experiments giving clues about how we learn and how we could teach better. I would love to see more investigators at school and more teachers doing investigations…

In 2000, I began my undergratuate studies in Biological Sciences at the Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales in the University of Buenos Aires, (FCEN – UBA). As an undergraduate student, I worked in the Inorganic Chemistry Department, the Physiology and Molecular Biology Department and the Laboratory of Cellular and Molecular Neurobiology, where I participated in several research projects studying neuroscience from molecules to neurons’ relationship with their environment.
In March 2006, I graduated from the FCEN and began my PhD research -with a scholarship granted by CONICET- under the supervision of Dr. Daniel J. Calvo at the Instituto de Investigaciones en Ingeniería Genética y Biología Molecular (INGEBI-CONICET). My doctoral thesis was focused on the study of the Redox modulation GABA receptors and in March 2011 I obtained my Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires.
Even though I have worked in cellular and molecular labs throughout my academic life, I have always felt drawn to Cognitive Science. This is the reason why I decided to do my postdoctoral work at the Laboratorio de Neurociencia Integrativa under Dr. Mariano Sigman with a scholarship granted by CONICET. My research –entitled “Little Teachers”- seeks to understand how teaching abilities are developed during children formative years without the need for formal education.
"Little Teachers" aims at shedding a new light and providing a vast corpus of information on the teaching brain and the development, phenomenology and pshychological organization of the ability to teach.

Experts in a particular domain differ from novices in the ease and efficiency with which they pick up structured information. This natural ability to discover and encode abstract relations (as in perception of a melody, relations among chess pieces, or a tumor in an x-ray) is called perceptual learning. As a doctoral student in cognitive psychology at University of California Los Angeles, my research focuses on the application of perceptual learning to education and educational technology. In particular, I develop and test methods of training and accelerating expert information extraction skills in mathematics, music, and medical education. To this end, I am also a member of Insight Learning Technology, a start-up organization aims to make available research-based educational technology that advances perceptual learning in mathematics and science education. My doctoral training also involves the application of advanced quantitative methods such as structural equation modeling and multilevel modeling to study the learning principles driving student performance and to evaluate the effect of educational interventions on learning.

Why are some people so good with sounds? Whether it’s linguistic or music sounds, some individuals are just better in perceiving and producing sounds than others. In my PhD project, I am looking at auditory processing mechanisms shared between language and music, and the factors potentially influencing their performance. By using a sound learning paradigm I am investigating the neuroanatomical, functional, and genetic factors that potentially contribute to sound-to-meaning and sound-to-articulation performance. The goal of the project is to address the following questions: Can preexisting brain differences predict
learning performance? How does learning itself shape the brain? And more importantly, what is the nature of the interaction between these two?

I was born and raised in Greece to a Greek father and a Swiss mother. After finishing my undergraduate studies in Psychology, I continued my studies as a Fulbright scholar in the US where I obtained a MSc degree in Neuroscience and Education from Columbia University. In 2010 I was awarded an IMPRS fellowship by the Max Planck Society to do my doctoral research at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands under the supervision of prof. James M. McQueen and prof. Peter Hagoort.

María Juliana Leone got a major in Biotechnology in 2004 and a PhD in Basic and Applied Sciences in 2010 at the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes (Buenos Aires). Her PhD was focused in the role of astroglial cells in the interaction between immune system and circadian system, under the supervision of Dr. Diego Golombek. Before starting her degree studies, she used to play chess actively and she obtained the Woman International Master title in 1999. Currently, she is working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Integrative Neuroscience Laboratory (Universidad de Buenos Aires –UBA-) under Dr. Mariano Sigman's supervision. Her research is focused on physiological correlates and circadian rhythms of decision making using chess as a model, binding her old love (chess) with her work.

Hello!
I am a third year PhD student at the University of Cambridge at the Faculty of Education and the Department of Psychology (Centre for Neuroscience in Education). My PhD research is about the relationship between emotion regulation and cognitive control in children. I am interested in how children can regulate their emotions and keep on learning in the classroom when they are experiencing negative emotions such as frustration. My main research question is how emotions can influence cognition, how cognition can influence emotion and the role of emotion regulation in these reciprocal interactions. I am also interested in the natural (as opposed to forced under specific instructions) emotional and cognitive strategies that children are using when they are confronted in a cognitively and emotionally challenging situation as well as the neural bases related to such strategies. For this purpose, I am using two main methodologies: one more behavioural/psychological (video analysis) and one more scientific per se (event related potentials). This research is carried in the hope that we can bridge educational and neuroscience research together.

I did my undergrad in molecular biology and pharmacology and then I reoriented myself into psychology and neuroscience. During my research career, I have also been working quite a lot with patients (children with ADHD, children with autism, adolescents with bipolar disorder, young adults with eating disorder...) and I have a particular interest in developing my research into clinical application.

Tyler Marghetis studies mathematical practice and cognition, from low-level number processing to how experts generate advanced proofs. After getting a B.Sc. in mathematics and philosophy, he completed a masters degree in mathematics education, and is now a doctoral candidate in cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego.

While his research cuts across methodological boundaries—from historical case studies and ethnographic observation, to behavioral experiments and neuroscience (ERP)—it is unified by a focus on the body and space in abstract mathematical thought. In one line of research, he studies the role of gesture in mathematical reasoning. For instance, he looks at how undergraduate students produce gestures that use space metaphorically to structure their conceptualization of abstract mathematical concepts (e.g. negative numbers). In parallel, he uses behavioral experiments to study interactions between number and space during rapid numerical judgments. More generally, he’s interested in the implications for education of embodied and situated cognition. Before becoming a cognitive scientist, he was a professional magician, a competitive gymnast, and an alternate for the Beijing Olympics in wrestling.

Cesar Coelho graduated in Biology at Universidade Estadual Paulista, but made his graduating work under Maria Gabriela’s advisory at UNIFESP, where he also got his masters degree and is a first year PhD student. During the masters, he studied hippocampus and amygdala interactions during contextual fear conditioning and the plasticity induction resultant of this interaction. During the PhD, this functional interaction interest expanded to other structures known to compose the circuitries involved in tone and contextual fear conditioning. His interests involves emotion, memory systems and individual differences related to active coping (reacting actively or passively to a certain stressful event), and how functional connectivity among the related regions translates into behavior. He also study different levels of brain activity, since molecular induction of neuronal plasticity to eletrophysiological activity.

Name:
Muluh

Cape Peninsula University of Cape Town (CPUT) and a visiting Academic at the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa

E Ticha Muluh is a senior Mathematics lecturer at the Cape Peninsula University of Cape Town (CPUT) and a visiting Academic at the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa. He has a diverse academic background. He received a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering, a Master degree in Applied Sciences in Engineering, and an honors degree in Applied Mathematics from UCT. He also holds a first degree in Mathematics from the University of Buea – Cameroon.

His research interest is on how the brain process arithmetic mentally. He is particularly interested in finding out why it takes the brain a longer period of time and many errors made in processing problems such as 8 x 9 compared to problems such as 2 x 3 (problem-size effect); and why the brain processes for example addition differently from division (operation-effect). He uses the surface electroencephalography (EEG) method in this endeavor. EEG records tiny electrical voltages on the scalp and this offers a way of monitoring brain activity in real time and thereby tracking any transitions that parallel changes during mental arithmetic processing (MAP). He is also currently interested in the source re-construction (localization) of brain activity during MAP using the Finite Element Analysis (FEA) method.

I am an Economist and hold a Master’s degree in Business Administration in IDE Business School of Guayaquil. I am International Chess Master, during my career I have accomplished a World Championship, five Pan American Championships, two South American championships, among many other placements and open championships achieved for my country, Ecuador. I began in the wonderful world of chess at the age 4 and from my personal experience I can attest to how much it has helped me in terms of acquiring strategic thinking, order and depth of analysis for my decisions, among many other skills.

Convinced of these benefits I have led several mass Chess programs in my province and found interesting synergies between neuroscience and Chess, as an example of this, is our Chess Massification Project "A smart move 2012", where chess is taught to 1890 children in 7 public schools from different geographical areas in our city, we will evaluate the possible outcomes that chess has had on Arithmetic and numerosity skills, short and long term memory , attention and concentration. These findings we will contrast with a control group of the same number of children that won't have chess during this period which is equal to one year. This study we are conducting is with the aid of the Department of Latin American Research Institute of Neurosciences.

Name:
Dr Hannah Pincham

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Developmental Neuroscience Unit, Anna Freud Centre, University College London

I completed my PhD in the Centre for Neuroscience in Education at Cambridge University. I am now working as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Anna Freud Centre in London (UCL). am interested in the interactions between emotion and cognition – particularly during adolescence. I use
electroencephalography (EEG) in order to examine the neural activity that underlies these cognitive abilities. At present, I am working on a number of projects that assess the effectiveness of various therapeutic interventions in adolescent boys with conduct disorder. Previously, I have worked on studies focusing on attentional deficits and the underlying brain activity that predicts disturbances of attention. That research has the potential to be utilised in brain-based biofeedback interventions. I have also been involved in investigating the structure and function of numerical cognition, and the associated difficulties faced by children with developmental dyscalculia.

I am a second year Ph.D. student at the School of Education at the University of Delaware. Within the School of Ed, I am specializing in Learning Sciences (Cognition, Development and Instruction) under the guidance of Dr. Roberta Golinkoff. I received my B.A. from Emory University majoring in psychology and linguistics. After Emory, I worked for Dr. Seyda Ozcaliskan examining children’s development of verbal and gestural communication.

Currently, I am working on a project to develop a computerized assessment that will measure the process and the product of children’s language development. My current research interests include the first and the second language acquisitions (especially motion verb acquisition) as well as the role of language on infants’ cognitive development.

Frederico Horie Silva is a Master's student in Psychobiology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), Brazil. His current studies are on educational games, learning and motivation. He is graduated in Biology at the São Paulo State University, Brazil, and he has worked as a science teacher in the Brazilian public school system (2009 - 2010). Since 2010 he has been involved in outreach projects in the field of science education at the Brain Institute, UFRN. His research interests are in science education and educational games.

I obtained a Bachelor degree in Biotechnology Engineering at Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica, and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience at SISSA in Trieste, Italy. My Ph.D focused on the origins of memory for language in newborns and young infants using behavioral and brain imaging techniques. Presently I am a post-doc at the IRCCS Ospedale San Camillo in Lido-Venice and a visiting post-doc at the CNRS-Universitè Paris Descartes in Paris. I work on different projects regarding language development and mathematical learning in infants and preschool children in Italy and France, and have recently begun a project to promote early mathematical learning in Costa Rica in collaboration with the Ministry of Education.

I am investigating cognitive remediation in patients with psychosis using a novel computer based cognitive training task. I am also collaborating with the Anna Freud Centre in London examining the development of socio-affective control in young and older adolescents, with the Centre for Neuroscience in Education examining the link between cognitive and motor inhibitory control during reasoning, with the Department of Neurology, Cambridge examining reward learning and apathy in patients with normal pressure hydrocephalus and with the Department of Psychiatry Cambridge exploring changes in cognitive control during depression.

In 2012 I finished my PhD with Dr. Denes Szucs at the Centre for Neuroscience in Education. I used various psychophysiological methodologies including EEG, EMG and fNIRS to examine the neural timing underlying cognitive control; the ability to resist interference from distracting stimuli. My aim was to dissect the cognitive and motor abilities that develop to facilitate access to conceptual knowledge.
I examined adolescents, young adults and middle age adults to profile neural and physiological differences in cognition across the lifespan.

I currently live in argentinian Patagonia, where I teach Psychology to future high school teachers of Science. My PhD. research was aimed at dissolving the Analogical Paradox: an empirical inconsistency by which the retrieval of cross-domain analogical situations from LTM seemed easy in natural settings, yet difficult in the psychological laboratory. More broadly, my current research interests focus on the cognitive processes involved in analogical thinking, as applied to activities like problem-solving, argumentation, comparison, and comprehension of metaphorical concepts. Our research tackles questions such as: Which are the difficulties we encounter when retrieving cross-domain situations from LTM? What can be done to overcome them? What mechanisms do we employ to determine whether two situations are analogous? How can we aid transfer of declarative/procedural knowledge across situations? What kinds of representations (e.g., sensory-motor vs. amodal) underlie our understanding of metaphorical concepts and expressions? Even though we have been testing our intuitions by means of controlled behavioral experiments, we are interested in devising ways of testing (and hopefully applying!!) them in real educational settings.

I am a PhD student from the International Neuroscience Doctoral Programme and I now work in a beautiful place called Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown. I chose one particular unknown neuroscience question and I am currently working in Zachary Mainen’s lab, trying to unravel the mysteries of serotonin in behavior. I am using an optogenetics approach to manipulate serotonin in the brain while analyzing animal behavior and neural activity.
I am emerged in an extraordinarily interacting environment, where diverse cultural and scientific events arise. For instance, I am part of a scientific communication platform, called ‘AR’ (http://ar.neuro.fchampalimaud.org/). We organize events to explore neuroscience topics, promoting critical and creative thinking.

I've graduated in Pedagogy at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (Brasil) two years ago. My experience with education is not scientific or academic, rather, I have worked with children education in different contexts. I've been personally in contact with education from very young children to teenagers, from rural area to big cities like Rio de Janeiro and also in a bilingual school in Germany, accumulating 8 years of hands-on experience.

Currently, I'm working as coordinator of pedagogic content creation in a technology start-up company, called Edumobi, dedicated to mobile learning. We have already created some courses, but our main goal is to develop a new gamified methodology of Mobile Learning, and I believe that sharing experiences with students around the world in such a stimulating environment like the L.A. School will help me build up a scientific point of view. It's gonna also be a pleasure to contribute with my own experience with education outside the academic environment.

Graduated in Psychology (University of Reconcavo of Bahia). Masters in Psychology (Federal University of Bahia). I have experience in the area of Neuropsychology and Neuropsychological Assessment with Children. I'm researching learning disabilities, cerebral palsy, deficits in cognitive and behavioral, neurotoxicology and working memory.
My first research project investigated predictors of learning disorders to dyslexia and dyscalculia. In this study we used an elaborate battery of neuropsychological assessment to identify changes in functions psycholinguistic and visual-spatial in preschool children. With the identification of these deficits was an elaborate program of cognitive stimulation. This program was established in twelve sessions and showed good efficacy to reduce deficits and visual-spatial, language presented by the children.
Currently the master, develops a research that aims to identify the relationship between working memory and academic performance. Some studies point to working memory as the best predictor of academic performance. From these surveys coordinate research in Brazil trying to understand the relationship between working memory and academic performance. Working memory is probably a better predictor of IQ and learning that is beginning to be regarded as the child's learning potential.

Marina Puglisi is a speech-language therapist with expertise in child language, currently working at the University of Oxford as a postdoctoral researcher. She holds a PhD in rehabilitation sciences and a postdoctoral degree, both at the School of Medicine of the University of São Paulo. She has recently worked in collaboration with an international multicenter research team aiming to explore the environmental effects on language and cognition. In her current research project, she will investigate the effects of two early intervention programmes on school readiness: one with focus on language and the other on executive functions training.
Her main research interests are to identify the linguistic and cognitive profile of children with language impairments; to explore the risk factors of this developmental disorder; to investigate the role of socioeconomic status in language and cognitive development; and to compare the effectiveness of early intervention programmes on school readiness, particularly in low socioeconomic environments.

I live in São Paulo, Brazil. Besides science, I have a deep passion for music, Brazilian barbecue and Carnaval. Nowadays, I am a postdoc at the Departamento de Farmacologia of USP. Since the beginning of my undergrad in Biomedicine at the Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP), I have interest in working with psychopharmacology of drugs of abuse. To follow this goal, after my graduation (in 2005), I joint the Departamento de Psicobiologia at UNIFESP as a Master`s student (until 2008) and, later on as a PhD student (until 2012). During the PhD, I had the opportunity to move to Winston-Salem, NC in USA for a very important collaboration with Drs. Jeff Weiner and Brian McCool at Wake Forest University.
I have been working with alcohol addiction research since 2002. My main interest has been to understand the neuroadaptations underlie individual variability in the behavioral effects of alcohol (and other drugs). During the last years, I used behavioral, biochemical and electrophysiological techniques to study specific neuroadaptations that may explain the variability observed in the locomotor and drinking response to chronic alcohol exposure. During all this years, it was possible to observe adaptations in opioidergic, serotoninergic, dopaminergic and glutamatergic systems specific to the behavioral phenotype to the alcohol chronic exposure. Nowadays, I have specific interest in the memory component of alcohol addiction, considering that drug addiction involves memory deficits and impairment of neuronal plasticity. People addicted to drugs have difficulty in changing the focus associated to the drug, perseverate on their abused drugs and struggle to learn new associations. I believe that we can use pharmacological and cognitive tools to help addicts to recover the capacity to forget drug related memories and learn new associations.

I'm a teacher of cognitive/developmental psychology at the University of the Republic and doctoral candidate at University of Porto. Previously I completed a B.A. (psychology) at the University of the Republic, and my masters at the Basque Country University. I also did professional service, specifically in clinical and public policies settings.
My main research interest is the study of subjective time and episodic foresight. My thesis is oriented to explore the ecological and cognitive factors influencing the emergence and development of the ability to think about the own future in preschool age children.

Belén was born and raised in Quito, a city cradled in the Ecuadorian Andes Mountains. She completed her undergraduate degree in Psychology from Baruch College in NYC. There, with Dr. Jennifer Mangels, she studied how students’ motivations and beliefs influence their selective attention and subsequently their memory, either facilitating or hindering learning from errors. In her graduate studies with Dr. Silvia Bunge at UC Berkeley, she is now exploring the positive experiences that can promote plasticity of higher cognition. In her current work, she is examining the effect of playing games on general cognition and academic achievement. She seeks to learn how simple interventions can be scaled and adapted to supplement a traditional classroom experience, especially for underserved populations.

At birth, children are able to discriminate syllables and recognize human language. Although certain auditory capacities form prior to term, whether and how these immature cortical circuits process speech remains unclear. Using bedside functional optical imaging and electroencephalography, I am interested to examine linguistic and non-linguistic discrimination in preterm infants, the earliest age at which cortical responses to external stimuli can be recorded, to evaluate human cerebral responses at a time when many neurons in the brain are still migrating to their final location. In other words, to examine whether the preterm brain is already able to perceive linguistic and non linguistic differences.

I received my BA in Cognitive Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009. While there, I worked in an infant language acquisition laboratory, looking at how children acquire semantics and phonology. During my time there, my interest in language was sparked early on, and I now work in bilingualism and second language (L2) acquisition as a student at the University of Pittsburgh and the Center for the Neural Bases of Cognition. My master’s looked at syntactic processing in native Arabic and native Mandarin speakers learning English as an L2 with eye-tracking. I am currently investigating the acquisition of non-native phonology in bilinguals and L2 learners and how accent learning can be improved with measures from event-related potentials (ERP) and behavioral tasks.

I am a third-year doctoral student concentrating in Human Development and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I work in the Labs of Cognitive Neuroscience at Boston Children's Hospital, where I investigate the neural underpinnings of learning mechanisms in typically and atypically developing children. At HGSE, I serve on the Editorial Board of the Harvard Educational Review. Prior to matriculating at HGSE, I conducted clinical autism research as a Donald J. Cohen Fellow in Developmental Social Neuroscience and a Zigler Fellow in Child Development and Social Policy at the Yale University Child Study Center. I hold a BS in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology from Yale, where I also participated in the Teacher's Preparation program, and a mentorship in early childhood education at the Calvin Hill Day Care Center.

In my current research projects, I am using Near InfraRed Spectroscopy (fNIRS) imaging to (a) investigate the neural correlates of imitation in children with autism and their siblings, and (b) study early numerical cognition capacities (such as ratio based quantity discrimination) in typical children. My main aim with this research is to inform the construction of more developmentally appropriate curricula and educational interventions in early childhood classrooms (though this is much easier said than done). As such, I am looking forward to working out new directions through which the worlds of educational practice and neuroscience research can reciprocally influence each other, with the members of the LA School of 2013.

I completed my PhD in 2011, under the joint supervision of Dr Denes Szucs, Department of Experimental Psychology, Cambridge, and Professor Alain Content from the Laboratoire Cognition, Langage et Développement at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. My investigations were looking into the mental representations of fractions both in children and adults. I now work as a post-doc at the Centre for Neuroscience in Education, University of Cambridge. My research interests focus on dyscalculia and mathematics abilities in children with SLI.

Currently, Austin Bennett is a second year Masters student pursuing a multi-disciplinary degree combining the Cognitive Linguistics and World Literature programs at Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland, OH, USA). He has presented at international conferences on topics relating to Identity, Empathy and Narrative. Other current projects include the frame blending and rhetoric in advertisements, and narrative development and gesture. Related to education, Austin goes in to primary and secondary schools where he previously or is presently working with Kindergarteners (intervention techniques to promote narrative development), sighted and blind 10-12 year olds (musical cognition), and blind 16-18yr olds (English instruction to blind students).

Austin has visited and worked at the Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble, France and Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule (RWTH) Aachen, Germany. He has received training and attended themed schools in the areas of Cognition, Neuroscience, Life and (Cognitive) Linguistics in Brazil, Denmark, Italy, Germany, Netherlands, and Spain.

Ignacio Rebollo is a Psychology student at Universidad de la República. He has an undergraduate research scholarship at the Center of Basic Research in Psychology and is teacher assistant of the Psychology, Education and Development Institute of the School of Psychology.

His research interest are the cognitive causes of reading difficulties that occur in developmental dyslexia. In particular how lexical and visuoattentional deficits interact to give rise to the different subtypes of dyslexia, evidenced through behavioral, ERP and eye-tracker data.

Joana Rato is a PhD student in Health Sciences (area of expertise of Neuropsychology), under the supervision of Professor Alexandre Castro-Caldas, at the Institute of Health Sciences of the Catholic University of Portugal. She graduated in Psychology (Psychology of Education) in the Lusófona University in Lisbon (Portugal) and obtained the Suficiencia Investigadora with the Advanced Studies Diploma in Clinical Neuropsychology by the Faculty of Psychology of the Salamanca University (Spain) in 2006.
Currently she has a PhD scholarship from the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT, Portugal) within the project "Emergent mathematical skills: Neuropsychological performance in preschool children". The main purpose of this program of research is to build a Portuguese neuropsychological assessment protocol that can be used to analyse children’s numeracy skills in preschool ages. This work is expected to address some critical questions, e.g., does a more distinct mental representation of the fingers also means a good performance of number sense?
Since 2004, she is a Professor at the Faculty of Psychology of the Lusófona University (Lisbon), and an Invited Professor (since 2007) at the School of Health Sciences of the Atlantic University (Oeiras). Lecturer in several subjects in the scientific fields of Educational Psychology and Neuropsychology. She is also conducting a national research, in the field of Educational Neuroscience, in order to assess if the neuroscientific-derived knowledge acquired by teachers is based on facts or in fiction. Recent publications include the Portuguese teacher’s perspective concerning the importance of neuroscience in education.

Lia R. M. Bevilaqua is an Associate Professor of Psychopharmacology at the Brain Institute (ICe) of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN). She investigates the biochemical properties of memory processing, including its consolidation, reconsolidation and extinction. Lia graduated in Pharmacy and Biochemistry, has a Master Degree in Genetics and Molecular Biology, a PhD in Biochemistry and post-doctoral studies in Neurochemistry. So far, she has published 70 articles in peer-reviewed international journals, which have been cited more than 2400 times. Her h index is 26.

Melanie Strauss, 30 yo.
I leave in paris were I did my studies and got my MD in neurology (2011).
I'm am now in 2nd year of a PhD in Life sciences with a strong specialization in cognitive sciences. My doctoral school Frontiers in Life sciences is, as we are, very concerned by education and most of all aim to develop new ways and tools for education (http://www.cri-paris.org/en/accueil-cri/education-2.0/).
My PhD project is about sleep, cognition and consciousness and specifically adresss the question : how far can we process information during sleep?
I like to exchange with people with different backgrounds, I'm very curious and my interests are broad, and beyond neuroscience, I love : traveling, skiing, cycling, reading, movies, playing ping pong... and I'm now a certified beginner in scuba diving.
Finally I have also different associative activities (mainly in science and medicine).

Alejandra Carboni graduated in Psychology from the University of the Republic in Uruguay (Udelar), after that, she moved to Spain to pursue postgraduate studies funded by a grant from the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation.
Upon finishing her doctoral thesis “The neurophysiology of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder “ in the Magnetoencephalography Center of the Complutense University of Madrid, she completed postdoctoral work at the Autonomous University of Madrid.
Most recently, she returned to Uruguay in 2011 to work as a lecturer in the Center for Basic Research in Psychology at the UdelaR and she is also a researcher of the National System of Researchers in Uruguay (ANII).
Her main work focuses on visual attention, particularly in the interactions between attention and emotion. She uses electroencephalography (EEG) in order to explore the neural mechanisms underlying endogenous and exogenous attention.

As an undergraduate I studied cognitive psychology. I became interested in language and language processing during my masters at the University of Amsterdam. In my doctoral thesis I looked at how the cognitive endowment in humans gives rise to communication and how the shared cognitive abilities influence the uniquely human ability to communicate with language. I now work on cognitive development and language acquisition (both first and second) in Trieste (Italy). On the one hand I look at how very young infants acquire and process the information about the world that surrounds them. On the other hand, I am also interested how our mother tongue shapes our mind, the way we listen to other languages and the way we process information more generally.

Name:
Anna Matejko

Department of Psychology, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada

I am a PhD student in the Numerical Cognition Lab at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. I am currently working under the supervision of Dr. Daniel Ansari.

My research focuses on how individual differences in mathematical skills are related to white matter integrity, measured by Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI). Specifically, I am interested in how white matter tracts support the acquisition of mathematical skills and how high- and low-achieving children differ in their white matter microstructures.

I am also conducting research on the acquisition of basic numeracy skills in preschool and kindergarten. While many programs have been developed to train early numeracy skills, few have been validated by empirical research. We are exploring whether there are measurable increases in mathematical knowledge following iPad training programs that are designed to improve basic number skills.

When I am not doing research I play cello in the London Community Orchestra, cook, and enjoy being active by playing tennis and running.

Camila Zugarramurdi is currently a Master's student in Neuroscience in the Program for the Development of Basic Science in Uruguay. She has received a scholarship from the National System of Researchers (ANII) and holds a position as Lab Assistant in the Center for Basic Research in Psychology. Her research main interest is language processing, particularly how concepts are represented in the mental lexicon. She uses ERPs and behavioral measures to approach this topic.

I was born in Buenos Aires in 1983. I received my BA in Psychology from the University of Buenos Aires and I have a PhD in Psychology from the University of Córdoba. My PhD thesis was focused in comparative psychology, studying the mechanisms underlying interspecific communication between dogs and humans, based on associative learning theories.
My actual postdoc research topic is in the field of developmental psychology. I'm working on communicative competences in early stages of development, and how this is modulated by temperament, parenting and socioeconomic factors.
Also I work as a professor of Behavioral Research Methods at the University of Buenos Aires. I'm a member of the Argentine Association of Behavioral Sciences.
You can download some of my publications from here: http://gepama.academia.edu/AngelElgier

I studied mathematics, physical education, and educational sciences, and became a teacher at secondary schools. In 2007, I joined the mathematics education group at the University of Munich, Germany, where I developed a strong research interest in psychological aspects of mathematical learning. After finishing my PhD thesis on mental representations of numbers and their relation to arithmetic development in the spring of 2012, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center of Instructional Psychology and Technology of the University of Leuven, Belgium. Since 2013, I am a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Education at Technische Universität in Munich. I am looking forward to interesting discussions on how to integrate research on (math) education, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience!

Katarzyna Jednoróg received her master’s degree in Psychology at the Jagiellonian University and a PhD in Psychophysiology at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, Poland. She completed her postdoctoral work at Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris.

Her primary research interest is the neurocognitive basis of developmental dyslexia. She’s particularly interested whether distinct subtypes of dyslexic children can be found both on the cognitive and neural level. She’s also interested in the influence of socioeconomic status on literacy and the brain. She uses recordings of event-related potentials, structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging. Her second line of investigation is focusing on the influence of emotions on attention and memory. Together with collaborators she created the Nencki Affective Picture System, a database of high resolution emotionally charged stimuli.

Neuro-cognitive aspects of creativity, enhancing creativity, developmental neuropsychology, the social brain and empathy: mirror neurons, TOM and their connection to learning and teaching. I am interested in bridging between different fields such as cinema with education and psychology. In my dissertation I attempt to provide a novel approach to free associations, a common tool in psychoanalytical psychotherapy, through artistic, creative and neuroscience stances.

Other Occupations: I am an active member in the Israeli forum of Neuropsychoanalysis. I participate in different groups of interest that each meet once a month: the child-developmental group of neuropsychoanalysis, EMDR and neuroscience group, Exploring Autism group and The Social Brain group.

I concluded my undergrad in Biological Sciences in 2009 in Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and now I’m PhD student in Federal University of Sao Paulo. I have been researching in neuroscience since 2006. Over these years, I focused my research in the behavioral mechanisms of learning and memory consolidation, reconsolidation and maintenance in animal models of fear memory, stress and addiction. Moreover, I have been always involved in education teaching in schools, social projects and in university. Know I am interested in understand how the mechanisms of learning and memory can be applied in education trying to improve the scholar structure of curriculum and ability of make people learn and do not forget significant matters for their life.

Leyla Mariane Joaquim is a third year PhD student in the Graduate Studies Programme in History, Philosophy, and Science Teaching at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBa). After obtaining her Bachelor's and Licentiate degree in Biology at Federal University of Paraná, she moved to northeast Brazil to acquire her Master degree in the field of Genetics Teaching at UFBa. She joined projects investigating how ideas about genes and gene function are treated in school knowledge, as represented in textbooks and students' views. Currently, she is devoted to her PhD dissertation in History of Science, which is a study about the role of physicists in the field of Biology. Using oral history as one of the methodological tools, she is interviewing leading physicists that turned their attention to the phenomena of life (particularly in Brazil, Israel, Germany and US). She had research stays at Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG – Berlin, Germany) at Department I (Structural Changes in Systems of Knowledge) and II (Ideals and Practices of Rationality) in 2010 and 2012, respectively. Accordingly, her research interests focus on Science Education Research, History of Biology and History of Physics.

I am a doctoral candidate in Hispanic Linguistics and Language Science at Penn State University. I received my B.A. in Spanish and political science from Moravian College and my M.A. in Spanish from Penn State University. Prior to attending graduate school, my professional experience included translation and interpretation work across a variety of technical and legal fields. I am a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and a member of the Linguistics Society of America. My current research interests include bilingualism, sentence processing, and code-switching, with additional pet linguistics interests in pidgin and creole languages, especially Palenquero Creole (spoken in Colombia) and Nigerian Pidgin. In my free time, I like to find time to cook and bake, do hot yoga, travel the world, read books for fun, and spend time with my beloved family and friends – and I’m hoping the LA School will finally be motivation enough for me to learn some Brazilian Portuguese – something I’ve always wanted to do!

Maria Eugenia Lopez was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1986 and grew up in Montevideo, Uruguay. She got a biology degree at the University of Buenos Aires and since her first steps at her program she got involved in projects related with neuroscience. Her undergraduate research focused on synaptic vesicle recycling at the neuromuscular junction under the supervision of Osvaldo Uchitel. At present, she is working at the Molecular Devices Lab at the Institute of Materials Chemistry, Environment and Energy under the supervision of Roberto Etchenique. On the other hand, to share her enthusiasm in doing science she had collaborated in a project called “Science on the go” where a group of scientists went to high schools to conduct experiments with students in order to give them a taste of science. She also worked as an educational guide at the Max Planck “Science Tunnel”, an exhibition about trends and boundaries in cutting-edge scientific research talking about state-of-the-art knowledge of the brain. This experience made her become aware that schools teach natural sciences in quite non scientific ways. To address this issue, she participated in the development of a workshop on how to teach science by doing science that was awarded a grant by the Program “Science with Society” of the University of Buenos Aires. During 2012 she became part of a TV show about science and cooking which led her perform a show at Tecnopolis, a science and technology park for the general public. In the near future, if she is lucky, she will pursue master studies related to Neuroscience and Education.

Dr. Waismeyer is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, working with Dr. Andrew Meltzoff. She received her B.A. from Cornell University and her Ph.D. in comparative and developmental psychology at the University of California, Berkeley with Dr. Lucia Jacobs and Dr. Alison Gopnik. Her current research focuses on examining the developmental roots of scientific reasoning through her studies on probabilistic spatial and causal inference in young children. Her research explores the development of children's inferential learning strategies both in spatial and causal tasks and how children's developing social understanding may play a role as an aid to learning within non-pedagogical situations prior to their experiences with formal schooling. Dr. Waismeyer has a deep interest and passion in using the study of cognition to improve education policies. Understanding the developmental roots of inferential reasoning across multiple domains will help educators and cognitive researchers alike in developing novel teaching techniques and establishing new methodologies for the study of scientific reasoning in early childhood.

Gary Scott has dedicated his professional life to urban education in South Central Los Angeles. He started his career at Crenshaw High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District and within a couple of years helped to establish and teach mathematics and science in the school-within-a-school (SWAS) at Crenshaw. This experience not only shaped his pedagogy but equally important, developed his understanding of and commitment to social justice.

His dissertation focused on developing an understanding of middle school students’ problem solving processes in a computer-based environment. Sharing his dissertation work with other teachers brought him to the realm of teacher professional development, not as a ‘more knowledgeable expert’ but rather as being a co-inquirer into student learning, to improve instructional practices.

His research interests are centered on applying cultural-historical theory and Reuven Feuerstein’s theory of Structural Cognitive Modifiability to the teaching and learning of mathematics and science. Based on these theoretical foundations he most recently developed and implemented the Inventatorium, based on his experiences at the Exploratorium in San Francisco California. The program has been piloted since September 2010 as an afterschool program for approximately student at 93rd Street Elementary School in South Los Angeles where 95% of students are economically disadvantaged and 61% are or recently have been English learners. In the fall of 2012, the program expanded to integrate the Inventatorium with the mathematics and science curriculum during the school day. The Inventatorium is different from traditional methods of teaching STEM subjects. What we have done [traditionally] in K-12 STEM education is to summarily ignore the role that imagery and emotion play in scientific, technology, engineering, and mathematics problem solving. We have incorrectly assumed that we think only in numbers and words and that emotion, creativity, and imagery play little, if any, role in the teaching and learning of STEM concepts Dr. Scott has discerned that instead, “emotion, creativity, and imagery are necessary to STEM learning and these elements play an important role when students have to make decisions about taking STEM courses in high school and beyond.”

I have over 20 years of experience in the teaching and spreading of the art of Capoeira in Brazil as well as in several other countries. I’m a certified Capoeira Master by Grupo Capoeira Brasil and have a degree in Physical Education from Universidade Estácio de Sá.
I‘m the founder and technical director of NGO CAPOEIRA CIDADÃ, with a Medal for Merit at The Pan American Sports (awarded by the City Hall of Rio de Janeiro for relevance in social work), and a cultural producer with several projects implemented and also awarded.
CAPOEIRA CIDADÃ is a social program - based on Gardner´s theory of multiple intelligences - which uses Capoeira as its main pedagogic tool. The program also stresses the power of signification and emotion in the process of learning and teaching as described by the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire in his work.
That is why my research main interests is the developing processes of multiple intelligences through Capoeira and other physical and cultural activities.

Name:
Fabio Moraes Gois

Master student at the Department of Physiology at the University of São Paulo and undergraduate student in Social Science at the same university.

I have a BSc degree in Biology, University of São Paulo. Currently I develop my Masters research exploring the interactions between neuroscience and education. In an embodied cognition framework, we are searching for psychophysiological measures of the teaching-learning process, such as electrodermal responses and eye movement tracking. While the first can be used to investigate the emotional links of students with scientific knowledge, the second is a window to access attention and working memory processes. We are also trying to build theoretical and methodological bridges between embodied approaches of cognition and situated learning theories.
In a parallel research, I am investigating the influences of teaching on students – of different school years – explanations of biological concepts. We are looking for evidence that shows us if school can guide the construction of scientific explanation by students, using Hempel’s definition of a scientific explanation.
This year, I've just started an under graduation in Social Sciences at the University of São Paulo, aiming to a better understanding of human’s evolution, and the cultural influence on the teaching-learning processes. Furthermore, I intend to study the different interpretations of natural phenomena in different cultural contexts.